


syrup hour

by daelos



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Unspecified Setting, enchanted woodland.. seasonal fruits.. fairies and other nonsense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-06
Updated: 2019-11-06
Packaged: 2021-01-23 23:30:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21328471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daelos/pseuds/daelos
Summary: A freak storm washes away the quiet summer that Jaehyun has planned for himself. In its place, he receives Sicheng.
Relationships: Dong Si Cheng | WinWin/Jung Yoonoh | Jaehyun
Comments: 44
Kudos: 214





	syrup hour

**Author's Note:**

> this is what happens when you wait until the middle of summer to actually start a fic supposed to come out that same season.... it gets spat out on the shores of christmas u______u hope you will enjoy nevertheless!

Jaehyun turns on speakerphone just barely in time to catch the tail of Doyoung’s sentence and hums as if he’d heard the beginning. 

“Like, I’m sorry that someone has to be the pragmatic one? Of course I’m tired of it. But since he never wants to _ volunteer_,” Doyoung seethes, leaving off there for dramatic effect. His voice has the uncanny quality of casting each syllable like a fishhook.

“Yeah, I feel you.” Jaehyun yanks the zipper of his suitcase all the way around and flips it open. He doesn’t feel Doyoung, not really. The core of these spats that his friends routinely get into, seemingly more for sport than for necessity, has always evaded him. He does, however, know how to listen.

“One of these days,” Doyoung theorizes, “my head will explode from Taeyong constantly putting me through the same song and dance. Pop like a soda can.”

“You think so?”

“I know so. I’ve already told him that vacuuming my brain splatter off the rug is his job.”

Jaehyun coughs in a poor attempt to mask his laugh. The stack of clothes in his arms, folded square and perfect, quivers precariously as he plops another few shirts on top before making his way to the chest of drawers. 

“I can hear you giggling. So glad to know that I can still provide you with entertainment while you rough it in the forest.”

“It’s not that bad,” Jaehyun protests. “The house is huge, and the view’s as pretty as I remember it. I’m still unpacking, but I’ve got the rest of the summer to relax.”

“You are being awfully blasé about living alone in the middle of nowhere. What if you get killed?”

“By who?”

“I don’t know!” Doyoung huffs, a wave of static crackling over the line. The reception out here isn’t the best, but that’s arguably part of the experience. “Plenty of bad things can happen when you’re all by yourself. Maybe I’ll skip a week of class to come make sure that werewolves haven’t mauled your carcass.” 

“I’d love company,” says Jaehyun, smiling at the shift in Doyoung’s tone while knowing full well he’ll do nothing of the sort. Taeyong describes this as the “I’m allowed to care about you and there’s nothing you can do” voice, which usually makes Doyoung sneer and kick him in the shin. (“Everyone but you,” he’ll inform Taeyong haughtily, and then they end up snuggling on the couch during movie night while Jaehyun takes the recliner. It’s like clockwork.)

“We’ll see what I can do.” There’s a pause like he’s planning to say something else, severed a few seconds in by a disgruntled sputter. “Oh my God. Taeyong finally decided to call me back. I hate to leave so abruptly, but it’s kind of important—”

“No, it’s fine! Go ahead and take it.”

“Right, well. Look out for me in your neck of the woods,” says Doyoung, his parting gift before the line goes dead.

Disconcerted by the new silence, Jaehyun flicks through his playlists for some background comfort while he finishes unpacking his things. A sleepy beat filters through the air first, joined a moment later by gentle crooning. He returns to the task of folding and unfolding, lining up his skincare products on the bathroom counter. Once this straightforward work is done, though, he flounders.

When Jaehyun’s grandparents had asked him to house-sit while they allowed themselves the rare indulgence of a cruise somewhere nice and tropical, he’d agreed without really thinking it over. He’s a total grandma’s boy, for one thing, and their rural residence had glowed serene and inviting in the far reaches of his memory. As a little kid, he’d rejoiced at the wealth of open space, high ceilings redolent of the scent of pine, the endless swath of trees behind the house that snaked all the way into the mountains. It was a six year old’s glittering fantasy, down to the fairies he claimed to see drinking dew from the bowed necks of wild tulips. Instead of brushing him off, his grandfather had smoothed a rough palm over his sunburnt forehead and chuckled, agreeing heartily to the wide-eyed tales of wings thinner than paper, gleaming like glass.

At twenty-two, Jaehyun doesn’t believe in fairies anymore, but he can still appreciate the tranquil beauty of the estate. He just thinks that maybe, when he’d signed onto this weeks ago, he hadn’t accounted for the sheer amount of time he’d be spending doing absolutely nothing. The wifi connection is arthritic at best, and though the TV in the living room receives all major news channels, Jaehyun has never been particularly concerned with current events. There’s a collection of DVDs that looks promising, but not nearly enough to expedite the passing of an entire summer. He can’t even kill a few hours by cooking because his grandmother had thoughtfully left both the fridge and freezer packed with enough sealed containers to cater a small wedding.

With a sigh, he swings a leg over the side of the ample bed and traces the whorls of the headboard. Ornately carved dragons swim through the wood, suspended mid-roar at its sloped crown. It’s whimsical in the same dignified way that most everything is around here, tucked safely away from the dust of the city, steeped in legend as old as the soil. 

Jaehyun’s fingertip lingers over the face of one of the largest dragons. The details of its fierce expression, its tiny scales and curling beard, seem for a moment to melt like ice under his touch. When he pulls his hand away, each intricate detail is still present, but the eyes appear subtly changed. A touch more mellow, more accepting of their fate.

The boredom is already getting to him, apparently. Shaking his head to clear it of delusions, Jaehyun rolls onto his back and resolves to nap away the remainder of the afternoon. He figures that the next couple of months will go by as quietly, so he may as well start adjusting to a routine of languor.

🌿

Not even a week later, Jaehyun’s short-lived peace is shattered by the most violent rainstorm he’s experienced in his life. 

It’s docile enough at first, making introductions with a pitter-patter that ripples across the roof. White noise for the night, practically. Then, the volume and pressure of the shower both suddenly accelerate until the roof suffers lashings, the tree branches outside assault the walls with a fury, and the wind shrieks like a vengeful god come down from the sky to teach mankind how to fear again. 

Jaehyun is so startled that he burns his hand on the edge of the rice cooker. As the storm steadily develops into a proper tempest, he makes for the sink to run the affected skin below cool water, then promptly rethinks that choice as a crack of thunder bellows from the heavens. 

“Shit,” he mutters, prying open the fridge instead. His hand enjoys a few seconds of relief against the chilled vegetable drawer until another thunderclap strikes, now even angrier, and he decides it best to leave the kitchen altogether. 

The master bedroom is the innermost room of the house, free of electrical appliances that could potentially fry him, and the sounds are (minutely) softened. Jaehyun huddles in bed with the covers drawn up to his shoulders. Rain was common enough where he was raised, but the brutality of this storm is like something from another world. A predecessor of modern Earth, maybe, before people dared step foot on its surface, when these kinds of phenomena existed solely to stir the primordial soup. 

Normally, Jaehyun’s a fairly unflappable guy, but he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t scared. He doesn’t know if this is considered normal for the season, or if there’s a protocol in place for dealing with demonic weather. At the same time, it doesn’t much matter because there’s nothing to do but wait it out, anyway. So he spends the night like that, bunched up tense with his pillowcase gripped in one fist. Sleep is fully out of the question so long as the howling continues. And it does, for hours upon hours, until he becomes increasingly convinced that the house will either crack open under its force or wash away altogether.

Near three in the morning, the wind finally stops. The rain is next, dwindling into a pleasant spray before it vanishes, and the resulting absence of noise feels almost foreign. Holy, even. The agitation has just started to leak from Jaehyun’s shoulders when there’s another sound, new and suspicious. Someone is knocking at the front door. 

Jaehyun seriously doubts that any human could survive the storm that had just taken place, including an axe murderer lost in the middle of nowhere. Even so, he remains glued to where he’s sweated through the sheets. If he stays quiet, they’ll probably move on. 

The knocking grows more frantic. “Hello?” comes a muffled voice, low but scratchy like it hasn’t often been used. “Hello? Is anyone there? I need… help.” 

Asking help from innocents is definitely a strategy that’s been used by serial killers. Wary, Jaehyun stays put.

“Please,” adds the voice, the word exiting a little mangled. 

Whoever it is sounds kind of young. There’s a beat of silence, followed by two more dispirited knocks, and then a heavier thump like a head meeting wood. Against his better judgement, Jaehyun gets up to answer the door.

There’s a boy on the doorstep, sopping wet from head to toe and barefoot. His hair is pure silver, and the way it’s plastered to his head makes it look almost molten. His face comes into focus when Jaehyun cracks the door a little wider, permitting light from the hallway to discern fine cheekbones and uncomfortably intent eyes.

“Hi,” says Jaehyun eloquently. He doesn’t know what he’d been expecting, but this is decidedly not it. 

“Hi,” echoes the stranger. “Is this your house?”

“Um, kind of, but not really.”

“Okay.” He thinks a moment. “Can I stay here tonight?” 

“Can you—” Jaehyun blinks. “Excuse me?”

“Yes.”

“What do you mean, yes?”

“Yes, you’re excused.” The stranger says it without an ounce of humor, as if Jaehyun had genuinely been seeking his pardon. He rocks impatiently on the balls of his feet, trying to peer into the hall. 

Shifting a bit to block the doorway with his shoulders, Jaehyun tightens his hand around the knob. “Look, um, whoever you are, I don’t. Think I can just let you in like this?”

“Sicheng,” he offers, a buoyancy to the name that seems to fill the space between them. “If I can’t come in, is there another dry place I can go? These were the only lights I saw.”

“Nowhere nearby,” says Jaehyun truthfully. This house is the only one around for several long miles, a lonely fixture on a winding, beaten road. Just going to the market is the chore of an entire afternoon. He imagines Sicheng, still drenched and shivering, making the trek with only the half moon to guide his way and feels something furl sympathetically in his chest. 

A rivulet migrates down the side of Sicheng’s face to pool above his clavicle. He draws his arms in, hugging himself for lack of anything else to do. Even his clothing is strange, little more than a wet sheet that flows uninterrupted from shoulder to mid-calf. “Okay,” he says again, clearly tinged with disappointment. 

Jaehyun raises his eyes to the ceiling and tries without success to talk himself out of what he’s about to do. It feels incredibly stupid for sure, but the alternative feels plain cruel. “If it’s really just for the night, then I guess… you can come in.” 

“Really?” One second Sicheng is looking at him with wide eyes, and the next he’s somehow materialized behind Jaehyun’s back, shedding droplets in the foyer.

“Oh my God,” wheezes Jaehyun, whirling around. “How’d you do that?” Already, he’s entertaining about a half dozen different regrets, if not more.

“Practice,” says Sicheng like that’s at all a helpful answer. Properly illuminated now, the brightness of his eyes is even more discomfiting, but not as much as the way his nipples are clearly visible through the fabric of his robe. 

Jaehyun clears his throat. “Let me get you some dry clothes. Stay—stay right there. Don’t move.” 

The way Sicheng regards him in response, quietly amused, reminds him of the fluffy golden cat who years ago liked to sprawl out in the sunbeam below his neighbor’s window. She’d raise her head as Jaehyun passed by on his way to school, resplendent tail swaying, and he’d look dumb and captivated clicking his tongue for her attention. 

“These should fit decent,” he says upon returning with flannel pajama pants and a warm hoodie. There’s a towel folded underneath, and socks, even, but underwear is conspicuously absent. Jaehyun just, he kind of feels like that’s a big step for someone he met less than five minutes ago.

Sicheng, fortunately, does not mention it. He just takes the bundle with a soft thank you and slinks off in the direction Jaehyun had pointed to the bathroom. When he returns, swaddled in overlarge sleepwear and squeezing the water from his hair, he appraises the living room couch. “Can I sleep here?” he asks.

“There’s a guest bedroom,” says Jaehyun uncertainly. “Up the stairs, first right. You’d probably find it more comfortable.” 

“I’m not used to beds,” he says.

Jaehyun doesn’t quite know what to make of that. “It’s got a firm mattress if that’s what you mean? Good for your back.” He also doesn’t know why he’s trying to sell the prospect of cozier sleep to a random who’ll hopefully be gone in the morning. Dude just seems like he’s been having a tough night.

“Sure.” Sicheng shrugs, balls up the towel in his hands. Briefly, he scrutinizes Jaehyun’s face, fortunately without paying much heed to his scarlet ears. “Thanks.” 

“Yeah.” There isn’t much else to say. Jaehyun lifts a hand to do some vague wave thing as he goes and aborts midway, tucking it into his pants pocket instead. Once he’s nearly reached the end of the hall, he casts a single glance back at the puddle that glosses the foyer floor before switching off the light. He bolts the bedroom door, just in case.

🌿

Daybreak arrives after a fitful few hours. Jaehyun wakes poorly rested but with all limbs intact, which is most important. He wonders if his guest has made himself scarce by now, or if he’d hallucinated the events of the night entirely. By the time he’s splashed his face in the sink and made his way out of the bedroom, he has almost succeeded in convincing himself that everything had been merely a hyperreal dream sequence. 

That is, until he catches sight of Sicheng perched on the kitchen counter with a wad of raw spinach in his fist, unmistakable in the sunlight, and is forced to accept the truth.

“Morning,” says Jaehyun wearily. He kind of wants to ask why Sicheng isn’t gone already, but that would be rude, even if he’s within his rights to be distrustful.

Sicheng shows him the crumpled spinach leaves. “There’s hardly anything green in here. Everything smells like meat and oil.”

“Are you a vegetarian or something?”

“Or something.” 

“Right,” says Jaehyun, “of course.” He yawns as he shuffles to the fridge, rubbing one fist over his puffy eyes. There isn’t much in the way of produce because of how quickly it spoils, meaning that it’s up to Jaehyun to make weekly trips into town for fruit and veg. After rummaging for a bit, he waves a bag of white peaches at Sicheng’s upturned nose. “These okay?”

The air thins momentarily, the feeling almost like a plane taking off, and then Sicheng is suddenly next to him. “Yes,” he says, eyes round with excitement. “I love them. We used to have—” He falters, expression folding in on itself. “Anyway.” 

Jaehyun hands the peaches over without any further questions. Sicheng doesn’t bother to rinse them off before sinking his teeth into the first one he grabs, unconcerned with the juice dripping down his chin. The skin gives way easily under his teeth.

For his own breakfast, Jaehyun prefers something more substantial. He turns on the stove and grabs a carton of eggs, some chicken, finds a knife in one of the drawers. Sicheng jumps back the second he turns around, forearms crossed defensively over his head even as he continues chewing. 

“Whoa, relax,” yelps Jaehyun, trying to make a pacifying gesture and only succeeding in alarming Sicheng further as the edge of the knife catches the light. “I’m not gonna hurt you! This is only for making an omelette.” 

Slowly, Sicheng lowers his arms. The tip of his nose is glazed with peach juice and his cheeks bulge just slightly. If this situation wasn’t so completely strange, it could be kind of endearing. “You promise?” 

“Yeah. If any blood soaks into the hardwood, I’m the one who’ll have to clean it up.” 

Sicheng squints.

“Joke,” mutters Jaehyun, turning back to his eggs. “You can sit at the table if you want.” This time, he hears Sicheng go, ordinary footsteps in place of the atmospheric pressure change that accompanies his faster movements. The chair squeals a little as Sicheng pulls it out, making Jaehyun wince, but he doesn’t add salt to the wound by reprimanding him after already having waved a kitchen knife in his face.

By the time Jaehyun’s brought his plate to the table, Sicheng is sitting cross-legged on the chair, crinkling the empty plastic bag between his hands. He watches Jaehyun eat with a focus that makes Jaehyun’s ears heat up, even though there’s nothing in particular for him to be flustered about. This is his house, after all (if only in a manner of speaking), and Sicheng is the outsider. And yet Sicheng has an energy shrouding him, a pinch to his mouth, that makes him seem wise in an old, unknowable respect. The memory of how he’d looked on the doorstep, dripping like he’d braved the thunderstorm at its worst, makes the hair on Jaehyun’s arms stand up.

“You’re hurt,” says Sicheng after a long silence, so sure of himself that Jaehyun reflexively pats down his own chest and legs to make sure everything’s still there.

“What?” 

“Here.” Leaning across the table, he lays two cool fingers to the still-pink splotch that decorates the meat of Jaehyun’s palm, a product of last night’s burn. His touch soothes despite the enduring tenderness of the skin. 

“Oh, yeah,” Jaehyun answers, surprised. “It was just an accident.”

Sicheng murmurs something under his breath without breaking contact, and Jaehyun’s hand is immediately flooded with a tingle not unlike menthol. He can almost swear that he smells it, too, a faint wisp of clean peppermint that disappears as soon as Sicheng withdraws. The burn is gone.

Jaehyun gasps, stuttered and delayed, as he yanks his hand up to eye level to examine it closer. But the inflammation, the pain, effects both physical and subdermal—everything has been cured. “You healed me,” he breathes. “How?”

“Practice,” says Sicheng again, shrugging. He gets up from the table and rolls his neck, then his shoulders, satisfied. “I said thank you already, but this works better. See you.” 

Gaping, Jaehyun watches Sicheng stride out of the kitchen and into the hallway, pausing only to collect his still-wet robes from where he’d left them folded on the armrest of the couch. He clicks his tongue at the way they cling to his hands but tucks them under his arm anyway. It’s not until he reaches the foyer that Jaehyun really registers what had happened, how casually Sicheng treated it, and the fact that he’s about to walk out of Jaehyun’s life forever.

“Wait!” he hears himself say, scrambling to give chase. He catches up right as Sicheng unlocks the front door, almost tripping in the process. “I… you…”

Sicheng does, in fact, wait, stepping patiently back from the door while Jaehyun struggles for words.

“My clothes,” he manages finally. “You’re still wearing them.”

“Do you want them back?” Brows furrowed, Sicheng grabs at the hem of the hoodie and pulls it over his head with zero hesitation, exposing a long stretch of creamy skin that plays behind Jaehyun’s eyelids even after he hurriedly looks away. In his peripheral vision, he sees Sicheng hooking both thumbs into the waistband of the pants, and he coughs.

“Actually, uh, never mind, you can keep all of it. Forget I said anything.” 

Sicheng makes a huffing sound that could almost be a laugh and tugs the hoodie back on. Jaehyun can’t face him until he’s certain that everything’s covered. “Is that all?” 

“Um,” says Jaehyun, still floundering. “Where are you going? Home?”

“I don’t know yet,” answers Sicheng, the amusement from just a moment ago curdling and dying. “I don’t have a home anymore, I think.”

“Oh, I’m. Sorry.”

“It happens.” He says it so calmly, but there’s a mournful tint to his voice. “When the storms get really bad, it’s not safe for us.”

Static crackles across the back of Jaehyun’s neck, as if warning him not to ask what he’s about to. Above him hovers an atavistic premonition that this is a barrier that can’t be uncrossed; if he takes the leap now, there’s no chance of returning to the existence he’s been complacent with for so long. Not without bearing the mark, at least. But Jaehyun’s spent his entire life playing it safe, following rules both explicit and implicit since he was old enough to make his own choices, and here he is now—teetering on the brink of something bigger than himself after a downpour that swept away the world he thought he knew. 

“Who’s us?”

For a long minute, Sicheng just looks at him, calculating. “You’re not ready.”

“I’m not,” Jaehyun agrees. There must be something in his face, his voice, his soul that says otherwise, because Sicheng tells him anyway.

**🌿**

The branches in this part of the forest spring back into place almost as soon as you push them. Sicheng treks a few steps ahead. Every vine and shrub yields kindly to him as he passes, recognizing him instinctively, then rebounds to slap Jaehyun in the face. Already, Jaehyun has accumulated a collection of shallow scratches, and the noonday sun heralds a flood of sweat down his spine. He bites down the urge to ask how much farther they still have to go and focuses instead on batting burrs from his sleeves.

“We’re almost there,” announces Sicheng like he’d caught wind of the suppressed complaint. “We have to cross the stream, but it’s close.”

“Cool,” says Jaehyun, successfully projecting nonchalance. While his physical endurance is more than sufficient, his emotions have been wavering on the side of silent panic for the better part of this journey. Adamantly, he straightens his shoulders even as a branch smacks him square in the jaw. He’s so concentrated on keeping the pace that he almost walks right into the stream, stopped only by Sicheng shooting an arm out to catch his chest. 

“Wait here,” Sicheng instructs. Crouching, he sweeps one hand through the clear water, a perfect arc. When he rises, he thumbs a wet line below each of Jaehyun’s eyes. A blessing, Jaehyun figures. He doesn’t know what would have happened had he tried to cross without it, but the proximity to Sicheng alone allows him to feel safe. 

“Am I good now?” 

The question, clumsy and unsuited for the gravity of these rituals, makes Sicheng press his lips flat to hide a smile. “Yeah. You can follow me.”

And then he just wades into the water, uncaring of the way his pants immediately soak through up to his calves. Jaehyun unlaces his shoes and stuffs his socks inside, dangling them from one hand while he follows obediently. He winces at the shock of cold, the way it babbles and pulls like a thousand dogged hands, but the stream is narrow and they’ve reached the opposite bank before he even has a chance to adjust to the temperature. The earth is damp from the torrents of last night and squelches unpleasantly beneath his feet, but still they continue. 

Jaehyun’s cheeks tingle where Sicheng had touched them just for that split second. He could be imagining it, but the line between dream and reality has started to blur with enough enthusiasm that it doesn’t really matter to which realm the sensation belongs. 

Finally, Sicheng stops and sighs. As hurriedly as he can with the ground still sucking at his soles, Jaehyun jogs to meet him. An enormous tree towers in front of them, highest reaches mingling with the greater forest canopy and lower branches adorned with flower garlands. Beautiful, easily, were it not for the jagged orange scar that splits the trunk to its roots. The inside of the wound is fibrous and scorched, reminiscent of a ribbon of lava. Jaehyun gets the sense that he’s attending a funeral.

“Home,” Sicheng explains, despondent and accepting in the same breath. 

Jaehyun can’t help himself, reaches out to stroke the knotted bark. “Was it the lightning yesterday?” 

“Yeah. Right down the middle.” 

“I’m sorry.” It feels inappropriate despite how earnestly Jaehyun means it. Sicheng doesn’t dignify the sentiment with a response. 

They stand quietly for a while, breathing the just-washed scent of the forest and grieving. Though he’s only seeing it for the first time, there’s a solemnity to the scene, the almost maternal splay of the tree limbs and the furious laceration in the center, that impresses on Jaehyun the magnitude of the loss. 

After some time, Sicheng reaches up to finger a bloom strung onto one of the garlands. A camellia, fat and opulent, stained a gentle pink from the stamen outwards. Reaching a bit higher, he attempts to touch the trunk, but his fingers flicker at the ends until they turn translucent. He steps inward again, but the closer he gets, the more the spell malfunctions until his entire arm up to his shoulder has vanished from sight.

“I can’t go back,” he mutters, drawing away at last. “You see?”

“Yeah,” croaks Jaehyun, occupied with watching the fragments of Sicheng’s arm gather until it’s whole again. “So what’ll you do?” 

Sicheng has already turned, headed now in the direction they came. Jaehyun doesn’t blame him for not wanting to stick around, fascinated and sympathetic in equal measure like a bystander watching a car crash. With some difficulty, he turns, too, and leaves the tree behind. The spongy soil and vigilant heat are more bearable after having quenched his interest.

“I’ll talk to the others. Chenle, Jisung. Whoever else can ask around.” 

“You could stay with me in the meantime,” Jaehyun offers, throat tight. 

Tossing his head, Sicheng lets the suggestion roll off him. “Stuck in that house?” 

“It’s spacious. And dry, in case the rain comes back.” Searching for something extra to sweeten the deal, Jaehyun adds, “I can get you more peaches.” 

There’s a telltale unevenness to Sicheng’s next step, his rhythm faltering. “Every day?”

“Maybe not _ every_—”

“Then no.”

“Hey, the market is far!” Jaehyun protests. “I could bulk buy, I guess, but they wouldn’t be as fresh by the end of the week.”

“I know,” says Sicheng, head turned just enough so that the glint of his smile is visible. 

It takes Jaehyun a moment to realize that he’d been teasing, too awed by the way simple joy lifts Sicheng’s dumpling cheeks and luminesces in his already bright eyes. He picks up the pace a little, suddenly revitalized. “Good,” he declares. “And I’ll help you. While you look for the others and stuff.” 

“Really?” Sicheng still sounds amused, voice still pitched low and warm, and Jaehyun’s chest twinges. 

“Yeah, for sure. Whatever you need.” Though he doesn’t receive direct acceptance, he does get a soft hum while Sicheng appears to think it over, and that’s as much of a win as he needs right now. 

Soon, they’ve walked far enough that the stream comes into view again, and this time they both cross without any ritual intervention. The sibilant current, though every degree as freezing it had been at first, feels almost refreshing. After reaching the bank, Jaehyun turns his head to the sun, then the thick congregation of foliage that flanks them on either side, engraving the moment in his memory for long-term preservation. Sicheng is included, of course: the way his pants cling wetly from the knee down, the cottony fluff of his silver hair, a snapshot of his profile against the endless stretch of green.

Doyoung’s throwaway comment about werewolves in the woods flashes into mind, now a distant warning from what might have been a different century. Jaehyun thinks that if there really are any wolves, Sicheng could probably deal with them. Not because he looks wicked, or especially powerful, but because of the tireless lift of his chin. A confidence that things disrupted will rebalance; a mission that slows for no one.

**🌿**

An unsteady routine forms between them in the days following, wherein Sicheng learns how to perform complex operations like working a toaster and the floral scent of peaches adheres semi-permanently to Jaehyun’s skin. Apart from the narrow and mostly still mysterious specifications of his diet, Sicheng is an easy houseguest. He wakes with the sun every morning and sleeps whenever he feels like it, either in the guest room or curled up in the overstuffed armchair. He doesn’t infringe on Jaehyun’s space and leaves so few traces of his presence around that Jaehyun often won’t even notice he’s in the room. The only thing that’s really jarring is his tendency to go without clothes sometimes, so unceremonious about nudity that Jaehyun feels embarrassed just for having eyes that can see. 

“There are no more clean towels,” Sicheng announces one evening, gliding into the living room.

“Probably still in the dryer,” says Jaehyun without glancing up from his book. It’s offensively boring and he’s trying his best to get into it. “I’ll run and grab one for…” The sentence turns to ash in his mouth the second he puts the book down. 

Sicheng is standing buck-ass naked in the entrance to the hallway. Jaehyun can tell because even though the corner of the end table blessedly covers his groin, he can still see a stripe of bare hip on the outside, no boxers, nothing. “I can get it,” Sicheng says, nonplussed. “The laundry room is at the end of the hall, right?”

Jaehyun nods tightly. “Hey,” he adds, finding his voice right as Sicheng turns to go. “Would you mind being a little more dressed, maybe, when you’re walking around?” His ears are already starting to warm. It’s not like he’s some pietist who’ll burst into flames if he catches sight of a dick, but there’s a difference in context between a locker room full of his obnoxious teammates and a forest nymph he’s known for barely a week making a catwalk out of his grandparents’ rug.

“Does it bother you?” Sicheng is round-eyed, intrigued. “Sorry. I’m not used to wearing much at all.”

“Naturally,” says Jaehyun and does his best to banish the mental image of Sicheng skipping completely bare through the woods.

That conversation in particular left Jaehyun’s mouth dry for an entire hour after it ended. But the rest of it really does come simply, or at least simpler than expected. There’s something strangely wonderful about knowing that he can walk upstairs and see Sicheng leaning out the open window, chatting with the robins that like to perch on the jutting sill. He can follow the smoky trail of moderately burnt toast to the kitchen to find Sicheng taste-testing his way through a shelf of fruit preserves. Sometimes, Jaehyun also considers going out through the back door to where Sicheng lies on the patio most afternoons, chin nested atop folded hands, light sifting lazily over the long slope of his back.

Honestly, he doesn’t know if he’s allowed there. It’s not as if Sicheng has ever explicitly forbidden it, not that he really has the authority to; there’s just a stillness to the scene that Jaehyun always fears disrupting. He spends hours working up the courage, putting his hand on the screen door and retracting it just as quickly, wondering if he’s prepared to push further beyond the illusory film. In the end, it’s not even him who decides.

“It’s okay,” says Sicheng, watching him fidget, “if you want to come out. They’ll talk to you, too.”

So Jaehyun closes the door behind him, nervous somehow, and settles cautiously beside Sicheng with his legs folded. There isn’t anybody around to talk to, he thinks. But Sicheng seems unperturbed, waiting patiently while he drums his fingers against the grain of the patio wood. 

The sun is beginning to set, now. Sicheng glows in iterations of tangerine and lavender, statuesque even just sitting there. His eyes are closed as he continues tapping in near metronomic rhythm, again and again until the horizon has sunken in a wash of brilliant copper. Only then do they come, chiming laughter that reaches Jaehyun well before he can see them.

“There you are,” says Sicheng, rousing. “It’s been ages.”

The smaller of the two, fiery-haired with dragonfly wings, crosses his arms. “Well, you’ve been hard to find. Since the storm, everybody just smells like thunder.”

“Yeah,” defends the larger one. He’s as tall as Jaehyun’s palm is long, wings pointed and downy. “How were we supposed to know you moved in with… with a…”

Jaehyun realizes with a start that they’re talking about _ him_. Is it, like, a slur to call someone human?

“This is Jaehyun,” introduces Sicheng wryly. “He’s my friend. Jaehyun, meet Chenle and Jisung.” 

Feeling tremendously out of his depth, Jaehyun gives a little wave. “Hi.”

“Nice to meet you,” chirps Chenle, taking pity on him. He smiles guilelessly, bobbing in the breeze, while his friend Jisung nods without comment. Just looking at them transports Jaehyun to the earliest summers he remembers, the fairies he swore up and down he’d spotted, and how he had been taught by age and experience to dismiss the sightings as an invention of childish fancy. 

Actually, Jaehyun wasn’t much of an imaginative kid at all. He was honest, though, in a way that his conscious mind with its myriad precepts can no longer permit, and he wonders if perhaps that’s what really taken from you the older you get.

“So we asked around like you wanted,” says Jisung, screwing up his face, “but the answers were kind of unclear.” 

Sicheng bites his lip. “Unclear how?”

“Well,” starts Chenle carefully, “in most cases, if your tree is struck so directly like that, you won’t really make it, right?”

Tersely, Sicheng nods. Jaehyun looks back and forth between them, feeling the question swell under his tongue even as he tries desperately to bite it back. “You _ die_?” he stammers. There it fucking goes.

“Not immediately. You get really sick, and your tree does, too, and then eventually…” Chenle trails off. 

“So you mean Sicheng will—he’s going to—”

“No, no!” The flutter of Chenle’s wings becomes rapid and distressed as he crosses his tiny forearms in an X shape. “Sicheng will live. He’s not full nymph.”

“Oh, thank God.” Jaehyun’s chest had been clenching so tight that one more vaguely ominous word might have brought on a coronary. Relaxing a bit, he turns to his companion with renewed interest. “You didn’t mention that to me earlier.”

“It’s not my favorite story to tell,” says Sicheng, scowling. “My mother was a forest nymph like me. My father was a human.” 

“The ears are a dead giveaway,” Jisung pipes up, suddenly excited. “It’s kinda cool.”

Sicheng’s hands twitch in his lap as if tempted to fly up and cover them, but he maintains his unruffled posture and the dignified lift of his head. His right ear, Jaehyun realizes now, comes to a sharp, elven point, whereas the other one rounds neatly like the lip of a conch. “Cute,” Jaehyun comments aloud.

“Anyway, so that’s what usually happens,” says Chenle. “But he can survive on his own, without a home tree, so this case is a little different. The only good suggestion we got is trying to share with someone, like a good friend or sibling. You’d have to be super compatible for it to work, though.”

“And since he’s an only child, we don’t have a ton of options,” Jisung finishes. He floats onto his back and lets the wind loft his miniscule weight, slowing the beating of his wings and kicking his legs out like a kid on the swings. “Man, things really are crazy around here lately. I think it’s the full moon coming. Everything’s out of whack.”

Jaehyun doesn’t know if what he’s about to ask is going to make him look really stupid, but he’ll give it a try anyway. “Can’t one of you guys share with him?” 

“Sprites don’t need homes to come back to,” Chenle dismisses. He links his elbow with Jisung’s. “We just kind of fit everywhere.” 

Sicheng has been quiet for a while now, twisting his fingers and pondering. Finally, he says, “What about Renjun?”

“Who?” says Jaehyun and goes ignored.

“That could work.” Chenle pauses in his attempts to braid his and Jisung’s arms together just long enough to think on it. “You two are close enough.”

“He wouldn’t mind,” Jisung agrees.

Something cautiously hopeful crosses Sicheng’s face, hardening after a moment into familiar determination. “I’ll go find him tomorrow.” 

Despite still not having any idea of who this Renjun is or where to look for him, Jaehyun has already made up his mind. “I’ll come with,” he says, watching the dying splashes of sunset in the distance. From the corner of his eye, Sicheng smiles.

**🌿**

They start bright and early the next morning, Sicheng raring to go before Jaehyun’s bedhead even gets the chance to wilt. He continues to rake one hand absently through his hair as they head out, trying to make the unruly wave look artful, even though there’s literally no one around to see him besides Sicheng and the shrubs.

“Who are you doing that for?” asks Sicheng, exasperated, when Jaehyun reaches up for the eighth time.

“No one,” says Jaehyun immediately. He tries to busy himself with smoothing wrinkles from his shirt before realizing that’s just as bad.

“Good.” Sicheng is matter-of-fact. “Because no one will be paying attention.”

Jaehyun snorts, but the truth of it is relieving. The longer he spends in these woods, the easier it becomes to gradually let go of the things that buzz constantly in the back of his head. Among the slim trunks of the alders, the air is pleasantly cool and seems to double in volume when you breathe in. There’s hardly any sound besides the ones that they make themselves. Though he walks on the ground every day, he’s never felt so directly tethered to it, as if the cord of his spine has manifested a metaphysical extension anchored somewhere deep below the fallen leaves. 

“What’s Renjun like?” he tosses out, more to pass time than anything else.

“Small,” answers Sicheng after a moment. It’s a funny descriptor to default to, but he looks genuinely pensive. “The smallest out of his whole litter. And the smartest and best. He’s like my brother.”

Unsure of whether or not to comment on the _ litter _ part of that statement, Jaehyun forges on. “You grew up together?”

“In a way, yeah. I’ve known him his whole life.”

That pulls at a couple loose threads from Jaehyun’s childhood. An only child as well, he’s never had a lifelong best friend or real sibling figure. Doyoung is probably the closest equivalent, but they didn’t meet until Jaehyun left home to attend university. He tries to picture what it would have been like to be born here instead, between the whispering branches and unending sky.

They take a different route today, weaving between snarls of berry thickets until they arrive at a rocky outcrop that looks over a depression in the forest floor. The taller trees are scant here, thinning out in a ring around the crater-like dip, and Jaehyun’s sweating a river without the protection of shade. 

“This is it,” says Sicheng, expression inscrutable.

Jaehyun looks around. “Looks like he’s not here yet.” Sicheng doesn’t reply, staring somewhere behind them. “What,” says Jaehyun, twisting around to scan the skyline and then the ground. Finally, he aligns with Sicheng’s line of sight and realizes: there’s a russet fox creeping out from underneath a scraggly bush, snout low to the ground.

“Don’t tell me,” begins Jaehyun. 

Sicheng grins, sparkling under the sun. “That’s Renjun.” 

The fox swirls its lush tail in a few circles like semaphore. Then, its frame begins to stretch and blur as though something uncontainable is growing inside it. Seconds later, there is a (more or less) human boy standing where the fox had crouched, shaggy-haired and draped in furs. “It’s so _ hot_,” he says. “Can I take the furs off? Wait, no, company. Who’s this?”

Seeing as Jaehyun is incapacitated by processing the events of the last minute, Sicheng takes it upon himself to make introductions and explain the predicament at hand. As he gets to the part about his tree losing viability, Renjun’s eyes shimmer wetly. The reverence that everyone of this forest possesses for its greenery, its safety and shelter, again rears grandly before Jaehyun’s eyes. For all he knows, Renjun might have considered that tree a home of sorts, too.

“Let’s go right now,” decides Renjun, straightening up as soon as Sicheng is done. “You can stay with me as long as you need.”

“You think it’ll work?” Jaehyun asks.

Renjun’s chin is lifted in a manner distinctly reminiscent of Sicheng. Another carryover from all the time they spent together, it seems. “Why shouldn’t it?”

So Jaehyun looks at Sicheng, who musters a curl of the mouth, and shrugs before following Renjun back into the brambles. They don’t return to the main footpath, veering instead into a slender gap between two thorny arms before stopping short in front of something resembling a small cave. A den, really, the rugged edges revealing that it had been dug with paws rather than hands. 

Right away, Renjun shakes out his arms and begins to collapse again into his fox form, giving a proud flick of the tail once he’s completely transformed as if to signal his disdain for living bipedal even for a few minutes. Sicheng kneels beside him, looking uncharacteristically nervous.

“Good luck,” says Jaehyun, placing a hand on Sicheng’s shoulder after a moment of deliberation. For the thousandth time, he resents lacking the proper vocabulary to talk about things so old, so mystical. And yet:

“Thank you,” says Sicheng earnestly. He twists back to glance at Jaehyun for a moment, plainly scared and grateful, and Jaehyun’s heart skips a beat.

A moment later, Renjun disappears inside the den and the air changes, thickens, suffused with a gentle orange glow. Sicheng reaches forward and it flickers. He frowns, reaches further. Jaehyun watches with horror as the light sparks and sputters like a blown fuse, clearly resisting Sicheng’s probing and eventually reverting to total darkness.

Sicheng withdraws his hand and cradles it to his chest. “It didn’t work,” he whispers.

Worrying at his bottom lip, Jaehyun suggests, “Maybe you could try again—”

“No!” snaps Sicheng, suddenly and fiercely angry. “I could feel it pushing me out—I’m not welcome—not here or anywhere—” 

“Whoa, whoa, breathe,” says Jaehyun, sinking to his knees as well. He takes one of Sicheng’s clenched fists between his palms and sits awkwardly with it in his lap for a few moments. Comforting people has never been his strong suit, but Sicheng isn’t people. Not in the broad sense, anyway. He doesn’t seem to notice Jaehyun’s stiffness or mind his dearth of reassuring sweet nothings. For an intensely charged span of time somewhere between ten seconds and ten minutes, Sicheng just allows Jaehyun to coax his tight fist open and trembles.

Renjun, still in fox form, pads over after a few minutes and nuzzles his snout at Sicheng’s thigh. Without speaking, without needing to, he understands equally.

Jaehyun’s mind wanders unbidden back to the way Sicheng’s face had screwed up when Jisung and Chenle explained his split heritage yesterday evening. _ “It’s not my favorite story to tell,” _ he had said. Dimly, Jaehyun wonders if there exists some link between that and Sicheng’s frustrated cry of not belonging anywhere now. 

“Let’s go,” says Sicheng after a long silence. He pets over the back of Renjun’s head once, twice, hand cupped and fond, before he stands. Jaehyun looks at the near-imperceptible tinge of red around Sicheng’s eyes and then at Renjun, who brushes his tail against Sicheng’s calf in reassurance, or maybe commiseration. “I’m fine,” adds Sicheng, though to whom the defense is directed remains unclear.

“Whatever you want,” Jaehyun accedes. That’s what he’s best at, in the end. 

Renjun trots in front of them as they make their way back, each crunch of the leaf litter underfoot somehow sickening. There’s a marked difference, Jaehyun realizes, between the tranquility of a forest at peace and the radio silence of one disturbed. He knows better than to make conversation or ask questions. The betrayal that tugs down the corners of Sicheng’s mouth translates universally.

Once they’ve reached the outcrop again, Renjun stops and sits back on his haunches. Jaehyun still has it in him to be startled when the feline shape warps and stretches, growing angles and limbs to settle back into one that’s anthropoid. “Don’t—don’t be too sad,” blurts Renjun as soon as he has use of his mouth. “I’m sad, too, but we’ll work it out.”

“It’s my fault for hoping that this would be easy,” says Sicheng, and Renjun cuts him off with a furious shake of his head before remembering that he has words at his disposal now. 

“All this means is that we need to think differently, that’s all. You _ are _ welcome here,” he insists. Despite all his discomfort at holding this form, he determinedly pushes up to his feet and catches Sicheng around the wrist. “It’s like what you always used to say when I got lost in the deep woods as a kit. There’s more than one path to take you home.”

Sicheng curls his fingers briefly around Renjun’s, blinking fast. When he pulls away, his lips have turned the slightest bit up again. “How’d you grow up so fast,” he says, and Renjun smiles back.

The mood during the walk back to the house is only slightly less grim. Afternoon is approaching full force by now, sticky and dense, gluing Sicheng’s silvery hair in ribbons to his forehead and the nape of his neck. Jaehyun’s in far worse condition, damp from almost head to toe. He grabs the collar of his shirt, tugging it out and away from his chest in a largely futile attempt to ventilate. 

“The heat really bothers you,” notes Sicheng as they turn left out of the birch grove.

“No, it’s. It can be nice,” Jaehyun deflects, and is surprised when Sicheng does his trademark breathy huff, the husk of a laugh.

“I used to feel the same. Whined about it all the time,” he says. He casts a look over his shoulder before stepping onto the long gravel driveway. The outline of the house grows steadily larger in front of them. “Now I wish I hadn’t.”

And for the thousand-and-first time in the past couple weeks, Jaehyun’s entire lexicon proves useless when most critically needed. He unlocks the front door and holds it open for Sicheng in silence.

Inside, Sicheng goes straight to the living couch and sprawls out face-down. He looks like a child with an arm and a leg dangling petulantly off the edge and grazing the floor. Hesitant, Jaehyun lingers under the arched entrance to the kitchen. There are words, he’s sure. But _ I’m sorry _ and the rest of its cohort still taste charred and trite in his mouth, so he ends up offering the only thing he can.

“Do you want peaches?”

Sicheng lifts his head a couple sulky inches. “Huh?”

“We have some left. They’re ripe.” 

“Yeah,” says Sicheng, blowing out a long breath. He plops his face back into the throw pillow so that his voice comes out muffled when he speaks again. “Thanks.”

Jaehyun studies him a moment longer, then disappears into the kitchen to rinse the fruit. When he emerges, Sicheng is sitting up and has scooted over, leaving enough space for Jaehyun to settle next to him. Their thighs brush when he hands off the plate.

The flesh breaks crisply as Sicheng bites in, pale gold and perfect. Peach season lasts well into September here, yielding an almost endless stream of sweet, blushing crop. Jaehyun knows that the best ones grow in the orchard at the other end of town because his grandmother would take him there on cool afternoons, then hoist him up to grab at the bursting boughs and sort his bounty into woven baskets. He knows that if you’re lucky enough to find one with a double pit, you’ll be blessed with a mild winter. He knows that Sicheng likes peaches, and that they remind him of something wonderful and lost.

And Jaehyun knows, too, that there are certain things within his power that can hush the ache a little. Maybe not quite as impressive as what Sicheng is capable of, but things valuable in their own right. Like: 

When he wheels the bike out from the shed to pedal to the market and returns with his arms heaped with still-dewy produce, Sicheng smiles. If he uses lavender fabric softener for the laundry, Sicheng gathers the bundle to his chest fresh out the dryer and slinks serenely around the house wearing only Jaehyun’s largest, fleeciest hoodie. Sitting here at this exact moment in time, one hand having found its way to Sicheng’s upper back, Jaehyun is gifted with a sigh, the warmth of Sicheng’s face pressed to his shoulder. 

“I’m glad you’re here,” murmurs Sicheng. “I would hate to be alone right now.”

Jaehyun, personally, is just glad that Sicheng can’t see his flaming ears. His hand flutters awkwardly where it’s trapped between Sicheng and the couch cushions, eventually curling all the way around to secure Sicheng’s waist in the crook of his elbow. “You heard what Renjun said. We’ll work it out.”

Sicheng hums his assent into the sleeve of Jaehyun’s shirt. “There are worse places to be in the meantime.”

**🌿**

“I want to show you something,” says Jaehyun over breakfast.

Sicheng pauses in his quest to scrape the last bit of jam from the jar. 

“Something nice,” Jaehyun clarifies, laughing. “You’ll like it, I think.”

Additional contemplation lasts for hardly a few seconds. “Okay,” Sicheng agrees, letting the knife drop into the jar with a clang. He’s especially mellow around the edges today, drowning in a slouchy band tee with the imprint of a pillowcase still kissed into his cheek. Jaehyun swallows around the acceleration of his heartbeat.

The compulsive babbling starts as Jaehyun leads him out to the patio and skirts past the deck. “You’ve shown me a bunch of spots in the forest so far, but I’m pretty sure you’ve never seen this one. Because it’s not technically part of the forest. I mean, it probably was once, but then the house was built so now it’s its own little—retreat, kind of? You know, I should just let you take it in for yourself.”

“No, go on,” says Sicheng when Jaehyun cuts himself off. He catches the door of the wrought iron gate in one hand after Jaehyun overshoots while trying to wrench it open. “I want to hear the rest.”

“You want to hear me trip over my words some more,” complains Jaehyun halfheartedly. 

Sicheng inclines his head and disappears, reforming in front of Jaehyun. “That too,” he admits, grinning like a kid at the way Jaehyun clicks his tongue.

“Now you’re just showing off.”

“Tell me,” insists Sicheng, walking backwards and ignoring the accusation.

Jaehyun presses his lips together and shakes his head, but his own dimples betray him. He’s too pleased at the playful slopes of Sicheng’s inflection. For now, they can pretend that yesterday never happened, or at least that it’s far away enough not to hurt.

He takes them a respectable distance from the house, relying on the largest and most distinctively knotted trees as markers. Though it’s been years since he’s come here, some things are ingrained deeper than you need to look for them. And though part of the walk is admittedly uphill, the way Sicheng’s mouth falls open a little when they arrive easily pays back the cost of any exertion and more.

The pond at their feet is shallow, wider than it is long, and shimmers blue-green. Their reflections warp in water, faces distorted by concentric rings. At the opposite bank stands a short altar crowned with a dragon’s head carved in dark wood and rubbed smooth by a thousand hands paying tribute. This is where the townspeople once came to kneel and pray, to shelter the dragon when it rained, to leave trays of fruit and verdant wreaths before the blocky podium where his claws would rest. Even now, the pond receives visits from ailing elderly and young lovers alike, but the custom has evolved into tossing in handfuls of coins and well-wishes.

There is also one more thing. Sicheng laughs the first real laugh to which Jaehyun has borne witness, open throat and delighted, when he sees the fairies tittering at the water’s surface. They’re even smaller than Chenle and Jisung, kicking up tiny sprays of water that sparkle on their gossamer wings. One flits excitedly up to Sicheng and stands on his shoulder, speaking directly into the shell of his pointed ear. Jaehyun can’t make out what’s being said; to him, the fairy’s voice sounds like faintly tinkling bells.

“I missed you too, Dejun,” whispers Sicheng, eyes crinkling. “We’ll catch up later, promise.” The fairy dances away with a satisfied nod, and Sicheng waves goodbye.

“So,” says Jaehyun. “What do you think?”

Sicheng breathes in deep and extends his arms as if trying to tangle his fingers in the sky. “It’s so beautiful. I can’t believe I didn’t know this was here.”

“Maybe it’s not always a bad thing to get out of the forest for a while,” Jaehyun suggests, then winces slightly as Sicheng whips around to stare at him. After a few seconds, however, the knee-jerk hurt bleeds out of his expression.

“Yeah,” Sicheng agrees, softening. His eyes refocus on the far side of the pond, the statue that gleams so proudly despite its age and solitude. “I guess not.”

They sit cross-legged at the sloping bank, side by side with the wildflowers poking up around their thighs. Sicheng sweeps his forefinger along the bruised stem of one and watches in quiet pride as the kink mends, the blossom swelling up and unfurling more vibrant than before. He does it to the next one, and the next, coaxing them one by one to stand taller and bloom brighter. 

When he tires of magical gardening, he kicks off his shoes and rolls onto his belly, content to lie still and drink in the afternoon’s warmth. Jaehyun hesitantly follows suit, somehow feeling as if the fairies are giggling at him, though he supposes he can accept that since he gets to inhabit this moment, if only temporarily, in exchange. 

Bending neatly at the waist, Sicheng reaches down and trails one hand through the water. When he straightens, he flicks the drops still clinging onto him at Jaehyun’s face and grins as Jaehyun splutters. “Isn’t it nice?” 

Jaehyun’s pulse thrums louder, competitive by instinct. “Heavenly,” he says, scooping up some water to cast at Sicheng in retaliation.

Sicheng yelps and ducks his head. Both arms plunge into the pond this time, then emerge dripping to the elbows. He smears his cold hands around Jaehyun’s neck and shoves one down the back of his shirt, crowing triumphantly at the way Jaehyun shivers.

“Not fair,” Jaehyun pants as he tries to wriggle out of Sicheng’s reach. “I wasn’t ready.”

“Think faster, then,” Sicheng says, vanishing from sight and reappearing on Jaehyun’s opposite side. There’s barely enough time for Jaehyun to get in another splash before Sicheng has rolled on top of him, pinning him down wetly by the shoulders.

“Okay, that was definitely cheating,” says Jaehyun, pulse steadily continuing to pick up. Sicheng is heavier and stronger than he looks with a surprisingly determined grip. He plants his knees on either side of Jaehyun’s hips and looks smugly down, a single bead of water slipping off the bridge of his nose to rest on Jaehyun’s temple. 

“Sorry,” Sicheng says, not apologetic in the slightest. The pressure of his palms increases fractionally as he shifts his weight forward. Like this, he’s lovingly backlit and dizzyingly close, the neck of his shirt—Jaehyun’s shirt—hanging down just far enough to offer a peek at the top of his chest. He smells like the sun. “Might be the full moon coming. Makes people insane, you know.”

Jaehyun folds his hands underneath his head and lifts his chin, meeting Sicheng’s eyes. “Is that right.” 

“Mhmm.” The space between them dwindles a bit more when Sicheng tilts his face down. “Strange things have been known to happen.”

The kinds of strange things that Jaehyun is imagining right now all involve Sicheng leaning the rest of the way in, so close that the embarrassingly heightened pace of Jaehyun’s heart would echo through Sicheng’s ribcage, too. And Jaehyun would put a hand on Sicheng’s cheek, or Sicheng on his, the heated proximity enough to evaporate the water right out of their clothes, and their lips— 

“Ah, I love it here,” announces Sicheng, rolling clean off of Jaehyun to flop onto his back a safe distance away. “Thanks for bringing me.” 

Jaehyun’s eyes snap open. “Of course,” he says, stomping down the tremor that tries to creep into his voice with absolute zen control. “Anytime.”

“Really?” Sicheng grins. “Then let’s come back often. Every day until summer ends. You’ll be here, right?” The grass rustles when he props himself up on his side. It’s easy to tell from the corner of Jaehyun’s vision that Sicheng is looking straight at him. 

Safe within the walls of his mind, Jaehyun counts slowly to ten before permitting himself to look back.

**🌿**

“What’s your home like?” asks Sicheng, apropos of nothing. He’s sitting across the room with his legs drawn up, head resting on the windowpane. The birds he’d been chatting with have departed, and his lids are lowered to half-mast in meditation. 

“Like, my parents’ house?” asks Jaehyun. The reminder is somehow startling, this long ribbon of lazy, warm weeks having successfully brainwashed him into forgetting he had anywhere to be besides here. Even tangible warnings like the printed bus ticket with his return date have been shoved out of mind, folded over and relegated to the role of a coaster on the dining table.

Sicheng waves a hand. “Whatever you think of first.”

“Oh. So my apartment.” Jaehyun pictures it and shrugs. “Plain? Functional. I don’t spend that much time there besides to sleep and eat.” There’s nothing especially homey about the space, which has never bothered him, but it’s not exactly enticing either. Once, a despairing Doyoung had given him a few potted succulents on his birthday in an attempt to breathe some life into his living room and snatched them back a month later when he saw how they’d withered. (“I water them!” Jaehyun had protested. “They just hate it here, I think.” Doyoung, hands on hips, had muttered, “Can you blame them?”) 

“Sounds boring,” says Sicheng, cracking open one eye. “Why would you return?”

“I don’t really have a choice,” Jaehyun snorts. “That’s just how it is.”

“What do you do there?”

Jaehyun glances at him curiously. “What’s with all the sudden questions?”

“I want to know more about the outside. I mean, I’ve never been, and what if I.” His Adam’s apple bobs uncertainly. 

_ What if I have to_, he means. They haven’t spoken about Sicheng’s dilemma at all recently, but it’s clear that he’s getting increasingly restless as the days sift by without any leads. In this light, Jaehyun supposes it’s reasonable to want to latch onto pedestrian details about somebody else’s life as a distraction. Or, more likely, as a contingency plan, though the idea of Sicheng wholly expelled from the forest and wandering lost makes Jaehyun’s stomach turn. 

“It’s not all bad,” says Jaehyun, fishing for a pen and paper from underneath the coffee table. “Or scary. Here, I’ll show you.” 

“I didn’t say it was scary,” counters Sicheng immediately, but he gets up to join Jaehyun on the couch anyway. 

Though Jaehyun’s no artist, he does his best to deliver a faithful representation of the block where he lives while Sicheng sticks himself to Jaehyun’s side tighter than the humidity of the evening should permit. “Here’s my building,” Jaehyun says, circling the box he’s drawn. “Twelfth floor, number seven. That’s my home, I guess.”

Sicheng brushes his fingers over the still-drying ink, smudging it a little. He nods and waits for Jaehyun to continue.

Furrowing his brow, Jaehyun sketches out a couple squares and the bus stop between them. “This is a florist’s,” he announces, tapping with the end of his pen. “My best friend’s boyfriend inherited the shop even though he’s kind of allergic. Their bouquets are gorgeous, but nothing compared to the flowers that grow here, obviously.” He freezes, trying to redirect. “Uh, and the building next to it is a café that serves the best almond croissants you’ll ever find. My friend Johnny makes the dough from scratch in the mornings.”

“Wow,” murmurs Sicheng, tracing both these boxes too. “What about the thing in the middle?”

“That’s the bus stop. I mostly take the bus to university, but there’s also a line that goes all the way to the edge of the city.” Jaehyun draws a long, meandering route that stops short of the edge of the page, then swoops up to the left diagonal. “You change lines there. 970 will take you to the only stop in the village, and then my grandfather usually drives up to meet me because it’s a long walk back to the house.” 

Concentrated, Sicheng takes the pen from Jaehyun’s hand and clicks it off, tracing the path forwards and backwards. “And us?” he asks finally. The dimming evening light gathers in his eyelashes when he looks up. “Where are we?”

He doesn’t sound like he’s talking about the map. Jaehyun’s mouth goes dry. “Where we need to be right now,” he manages.

Sicheng’s lips part very slightly.

“I’m gonna get some water,” says Jaehyun suddenly, pushing himself up. The instant loss of body heat pleads for him to come back. He makes his way to the kitchen, hands trembling, and reaches unsteadily for a glass. It slips right out of his slick palm and shatters into a dozen wicked shards on the tile. “Fuck,” he mutters, bending to clean it up. 

“Don’t touch it!” shouts Sicheng, skidding through the archway. He radiates panic despite not having a thing to do with the broken glass, eyes wild, arms tensed. 

“Huh? It’s fine, it was my fault anyway—” 

“I couldn’t catch it,” Sicheng tells him almost feverishly. “That’s the problem.” 

“But you were all the way in the other room,” says Jaehyun, puzzled. 

“Yeah, but I can usually, you know, _ move_,” he explains. His syllables start knocking into each other, increasing in velocity as he goes. “I felt the glass about to drop, and I tried to move here to catch it in time.”

“Your teleportation thing? Maybe you’re just tired.” 

Sicheng shakes his head. “It just failed. That’s never happened before.” 

Helpless, Jaehyun raises his hands in surrender. For all he’s learned, there are a million more unwritten commandments of magic that he’ll never fully understand. “We can ask Chenle and Jisung if they come by tonight,” he says, trying for placating. “They’ll have ideas. Let me clean this up in the meantime?”

“I guess,” answers Sicheng. Deflated. He reaches gingerly over the pile of glass to take one of Jaehyun’s hands, brushing over the meat of his palm before dropping it. “Be careful. Wear something to protect yourself.” His touch tingles phantomly even without a spell infused into his fingers. 

“Yeah.”

“I’ll be outside,” says Sicheng finally and leaves like people do, walking on his own feet. Gravity, wearisome, keeps him shackled and sits bulky over the hunch of his shoulders.

Jaehyun finds his grandfather’s thick gardening gloves tucked into a cabinet and crouches a safe distance away from the site of impact as he cleans. They have a broom in the pantry, so he sweeps. They have a hand vacuum in the linen closet, so he runs that too. And they have a window behind the sink that yawns pink and lavender across the rest of the kitchen, framing the final splinters of the sun now succumbing to the horizon. Jaehyun wonders why it is that the longer he spends here, the sadder he feels to see the daylight depart. He never paid much attention to the sunset in the city, although perhaps that’s because he had no one there to watch it with.

By the time he joins Sicheng out on the deck, the cicadas have started warbling. It takes some straining of the eyes to make out Chenle and Jisung’s minute silhouettes, but they’re here as well, always close enough that their wings brush every few seconds.

“… figured it was probably bound to happen,” Chenle is saying. “You’re becoming more human.”  
  
Sicheng’s reaction is immediate and visceral, his entire body recoiling at the theory. “That’s not possible.”

“Okay, maybe not. You only had so much in you to begin with. But you’ve been without your tree for so long now that it might be all you have to fall back on.”

“He’s getting paler the longer you talk,” Jisung observes. 

“Well, sorry,” says Chenle, wringing his hands. “But doesn’t it make sense?”

Settling cross-legged beside Sicheng, Jaehyun waves at the sprites without enthusiasm. “So what’s the official diagnosis?” 

“I’m dying,” declares Sicheng flatly.

“Come on, when did I say that?” Chenle huffs. “You’re losing your connection is what I meant.”

“That’s reversible, I think,” says Jisung. 

“Your last theory was flawed.” Sulking, Sicheng wraps his arms around his knees. “What makes this one any better?”

“Second time’s the charm,” Jisung answers seriously.

Sicheng groans.

“The mood is really tanking here.” Chenle frowns at them and then at his own dangling feet, as if reliving the upsetting failure of the Renjun debacle. “Listen, we’ve got better odds this time. The full moon is in just a few days.”

“And that’s a good thing,” ventures Jaehyun, going off of the determinedly positive bounce to Chenle’s tone. “Because…?”

“Things flourish under the moon. Things are repaired. It’s one of the first truths you ever learn around here,” says Sicheng and lifts his head.

“And blessings are given,” adds Jisung. “That helps, too.”

Chenle performs something like jazz hands in agreement. “We have a plan.”

So council remains in session outside until the cloak of night turns blue-black above them, Sicheng’s hand a hair’s breadth from Jaehyun’s own all the while. Jisung’s wings beat three hundred and sixty-two times before Jaehyun is able to summon the boldness to close the distance. Straight away, Sicheng curls his fingers around Jaehyun’s and holds tight, prompting him to wonder why he was so nervous to reach out in the first place. 

All Jaehyun does, it seems, is waste time weighing choices that are mostly made for him already. It seems an awfully callous habit to maintain when Sicheng, right next to him, is at the mercy of a countdown clock plotting to sever him from all he knows. With his palm pressed to Sicheng’s, the humid darkness lapping at their ankles to the rhythm of Chenle’s tinny voice, Jaehyun makes a promise.

Much later, so late that it’s nearly early, a knock sounds on Jaehyun’s closed bedroom door.

“Come in,” calls Jaehyun, sitting up. He wasn’t sleeping anyway.

The door creaks open to betray the shadow-dampened shape of Sicheng in the hallway. His hair, a cask of glazed metal, catches the moonlight in arcs. “Sorry,” he says and steps forward. “It’s just that I keep thinking too much.” 

“No, it’s okay,” says Jaehyun, “me too.”

Sicheng shifts his weight from one foot to the other.

The promise Jaehyun had made was this: because time is fleeting, the precious little that still belongs to them can’t be squandered agonizing over the things he wants. He needs to leap first. Shutting his eyes for a moment to steady himself, Jaehyun lifts the corner of his thin duvet. “Do you want…?”

“Yes,” Sicheng breathes. “Please.”

His knees knock against Jaehyun’s when he crawls in. Neither of them is used to accommodating another body, so they shift awkwardly for a bit before achieving harmony: on their sides, facing inward, Sicheng’s forearm bent over his eyes. Jaehyun with one calf trapped between two colder, slimmer ones. Breathing slower and slower until the rise and fall of their chests becomes a duet.

“What if it doesn’t work,” says Sicheng almost too quietly to be heard. 

“It will. It has to.”

“But if it doesn’t?”

“Then you think and plan and try again. Home is home.”  
  
There’s no response. Jaehyun goes stiff, wondering how he could have phrased it better. Maybe that was the wrong avenue and he accidentally exacerbated Sicheng’s frustration. He should keep his mouth shut, probably, and just pretend to drift off while he’s at it.

“Hey,” whispers Sicheng. He unfolds the arm covering his face, looking into and through Jaehyun. “You don’t have to worry so much about what to say to make me feel better, you know. Just you being here is enough.”

“_Sicheng_,” says Jaehyun wetly. The wave of emotion rises unbidden, wedging so firmly in his throat he can’t say anything else.

“Jaehyun,” Sicheng parrots, smiling. He touches his own chest, then Jaehyun’s, right over his heart.

**🌿**

The arrival of the full moon is cushioned by a series of days so beautiful and idle that Jaehyun is nearly coerced into neglecting its importance. It’s just that when Sicheng is in his bed, nothing else seems three-dimensional. When Sicheng lays his head in Jaehyun’s lap, lush mouth skimming the curve of his thigh, there is nowhere in the world Jaehyun would rather look. Some secret lock has at last encountered its key; they’re not cohabiting the house so much as drifting through it attached.

But then the last morning comes, and Sicheng withdraws so completely back into himself that Jaehyun’s fingertips practically sing with hot whiplash when he tries to reach out again.

“Are you feeling alright?” he asks, testing the waters.

“Fine,” mutters Sicheng, clipped, then stalks out of the kitchen before Jaehyun has the chance to ask anything else.

Jaehyun sighs at the bare counter. He decides to chalk the behavior up to the tension of tonight, the full moon due to rise terribly soon now. Of course Sicheng is stressed. And Jaehyun wants to help, naturally, but he has neither the answers nor even a guarantee that everything will go according to plan. It’s twelve hours to midnight.

Anxiety continues to manifest as the day wears on. Sicheng paces tirelessly around the upper floor and haunts the stairwell, pausing only to check the fridge for peaches and becoming even more jittery when he sees that they’re out. He white-knuckles the banister and every so often heaves great, jagged sighs. His entire presence feels hardened, brimming with tangled nervous energy that has nowhere to go but back into him like a never-ending feedback loop.

When Jaehyun can no longer bear to orbit apprehensively around Sicheng’s general vicinity, he returns to his room and tries unsuccessfully to summon sleep. Doyoung texts him sometime close to dusk, leaving Jaehyun to stare at the message with no clue how to respond. What would he even say? How can he begin to explain what’s been consuming him lately? He types out something just long enough to evade concern and hits send before he can overthink. Five hours to midnight.

Dinnertime passes without seeing either of them so much as approach the table. Jaehyun reheats one of the containers his grandmother has left, and Sicheng pushes around a salad for all of two minutes before abandoning it on the counter. Predictably, Jaehyun doesn’t have it in him to nag. Instead, he clears the dishes and runs the sink and hopes fervently that someone will still remind Sicheng to eat once Jaehyun is gone.

At two hours to midnight, Jaehyun’s door opens a fraction. “You coming?” asks Sicheng carefully. He’s changed back into the gauzy robes he wore when he first washed up here. 

“Obviously,” says Jaehyun, hastening to stand. 

Sicheng observes him for a minute in the lamplight. “Leaving now.” 

He spins over his shoulder, uninterested in what Jaehyun’s response might have been. The same briskness is maintained as they head out; he barely waits for Jaehyun to lock the front door, or to duck below the massive tangle of vines he should know to avoid by now. Even his stride, normally shorter than Jaehyun’s, is lengthened and quickened by intent. Shoving his hands into his pockets, Jaehyun wordlessly keeps pace. 

When at last they reach the familiar stream, Sicheng doesn’t falter a second before wading into it, robes dragging behind him and all. This was the crux of Chenle’s idea: that bathing in the blessed water underneath the forgiving moon, coupled with the purity of Sicheng’s spirit, should be enough to secure his return. It had made sense when he explained it, but they had also been hanging onto his every word out of desperation. 

To Jaehyun, the whole affair seems a bit Stygian, but in a circular way, that makes sense, too. After all, wasn’t the hero of that story also born treading the line between two worlds? It’s easy to sketch Sicheng in his place, especially with the way the moonbeams crown his silver head and drape his bared clavicles in luster. The prince, homecoming. Drenched head to toe as he’d been that first night on Jaehyun’s doorstep, but this time he’s sought it out himself. 

“Can I cross?” asks Jaehyun. 

Sicheng faces him, wet and glittering. “You still want to?”

Rubbing his prickling arms, Jaehyun says, “I mean, I didn’t come all the way out here just to turn back now.”

“Right,” says Sicheng. He’s looking at Jaehyun funny, but he thumbs the dampness of the stream below Jaehyun’s eyes without saying anything else. One swollen droplet rolls off Jaehyun’s left cheek. 

They make their way to the tree in near silence, punctuated only by the squelch of Jaehyun’s waterlogged shoes. It’s still as breathtaking and miserable as Jaehyun remembers. He brushes the back of his hand first against the knotted scar, then over a cluster of brittle leaves. 

Sicheng kneels in the dirt and bows. His robes are muddied, hem trodden on, sleeves pressed to the mulch. He’s whispering something, Jaehyun thinks. Maybe praying. A long minute creeps past, and eventually another one. The few filmy rays of moonlight that make it between the tree branches seem to sway.

Finally straightening, Sicheng reaches for the tree with a shaking hand. It skims the bark. He sucks in a hopeful breath and moves closer. 

Jaehyun, hit with a sudden premonition, wants nothing more than to squeeze his eyes shut and turn away, but some otherworldly force keeps him glued to his spot as it plays out in slow motion. Sicheng’s hand winks entirely out of sight, followed rapidly by the rest of his arm. He can neither touch the tree nor get any nearer, and after the few devastating seconds it takes for him to process the rebuff, he crumples to the ground. 

“It’s okay,” whispers Jaehyun hoarsely as he watches Sicheng cry. His blood ices over.

The shadows cut into Sicheng’s face so starkly when he lifts his head that he looks briefly possessed. “Don’t say that,” he snarls. “You don’t know anything. What _ did _ you come all this way for, anyway? To see this and be relieved?” 

Each word slams squarely into Jaehyun’s solar plexus. “The fuck do you mean,” he says.

“I saw your bus ticket.” Voice soft this time, self-control regained. “You’re leaving in a week. But you still let me think you’d be here until summer ended. When were you planning to tell me?”

A dizzying swirl of feather-edged memories. Sicheng curled catlike into Jaehyun’s lap, on the couch with his head on Jaehyun’s shoulder, the warmth of his neck, the wildflowers framing him mid-laugh. “I was,” begins Jaehyun and finds nothing more.

“You know, my mother fell in love with a human,” says Sicheng conversationally. “She showed him everything. Gave him everything. Then, he left her to go back to his job and his wife and his glass house. My mother had me alone.”

“Sicheng—” 

“That’s what humans do. They run from place to place and forget where their soul has roots. They forget you ever existed.”

“I couldn’t,” says Jaehyun, throat constricting. “Not you. I promise.” 

“I don’t want to hear your promises,” Sicheng tells him. “I only wanted to go home.”

It’s the dead of night in July and Jaehyun is shivering. “You had—you have one, still. The house is yours as much as it is mine.” 

Expressionless, Sicheng stands. “Didn’t you tell me it wasn’t yours to begin with?”

He turns and is gone. Even stripped of his ability to melt the edges of space-time, he moves impossibly quick. Jaehyun couldn’t dream of catching up to him, not in the darkness of these woods that he hardly knows. 

So he walks back to the house, takes four wrong turns in the process, trips and skins his knee and washes it clean in the perpetually frigid stream. He drops his keys trying to unlock the front door. He contemplates sobbing and takes a long shower instead, a futile attempt to rinse away the sensation of having been scooped hollow. 

According to Chenle, most spirits just die when their tree does. Sicheng had said once that it’s kinder that way. His nose had been pressed into Jaehyun’s shoulder, his breathing slow and deep, the sheets kicked off the bed. “I can tell you don’t agree,” he’d murmured, “but the forest is all I’ve ever known.” 

Jaehyun pictures Sicheng wandering lonely between the vines and thorns and jagged rocks, cast out by the only place he’d ever wanted to stay. He wonders if Sicheng was right.

**🌿**

These days are long and quiet.

Jaehyun wasn’t prepared for the sudden emptiness, the disconcertment upon seeing the throw pillows unruffled and his clothes still lying folded where he left them. Nobody burns toast anymore. It’s a stupid thing to miss. He makes the guest bed, long gone cold, with hotel corners and grasps blindly at any feeling of accomplishment. A lone robin chitters at him from the windowsill, so he shuts the curtains.

“You must be bored out of your mind,” says Doyoung when he calls. There’s something audibly boiling on his end of the line, accented by the percussive clang of his spoon against the pot. “Does nothing interesting ever happen over there?” 

“You’d be surprised,” says Jaehyun absently.

“Yeah?” Doyoung tastes whatever he’s stirring and goes rummaging through his cabinets, dissatisfied. “I guess it’s worth the visit, then.” 

“Nah,” Jaehyun replies. It’s too quick, a little suspicious. “No need to come all this way. I mean, I won’t trouble you.”

“Hmm. Sounds like you’re trying to keep me out.”

“It’s not that!”

Doyoung’s laughter echoes. “What, are you having a little summer fling?”

There’s a beat of silence, the kind of sad that crawls on your skin, before Jaehyun can muster up an answering chuckle. It doesn’t land quite right, but he manages to successfully divert the topic to Taeyong not long after. The conversation script mostly writes itself beyond that point. 

On what Jaehyun thinks is probably Sunday, he takes the bike to the market. He realizes two things as soon as he gets there. Firstly, it’s actually Monday because the honeycomb stand is out front, the sides of the seller’s jars dripping leisurely gold. Secondly, he must look absolutely wretched because every auntie in his line of sight immediately frowns and starts preparing a basket of freebies for him to take.

“I couldn’t possibly accept,” insists Jaehyun again and again, dipping his head in gratitude for each stall he passes. “The cucumbers look wonderful,” he says to one, and “Thank you, but I just can’t eat all this radish myself,” to another. On another occasion, he would have collected them beaming, but today the surplus would only force him to confront his solitude. The aunties click their tongues disapprovingly but return their attention to their other customers.

Jaehyun didn’t come needing much, anyway, just a couple onions and some chilis, but the last stand on his way out inevitably catches his eye. The woman behind it, tiny and wizened, smiles wide as he approaches. Her expression quickly withers once he’s in front of her.

“Oh,” she says, a long, cracked sigh. “A face so handsome has no business looking so miserable. Your sadness is spilling everywhere.”

“I’m sorry,” says Jaehyun, startled. “I’ll… rein it in?”

“It doesn’t work like that,” she tells him. One of her worn hands comes up to pat vaguely at his jaw. “What’s wrong, son? Did a nymph break your heart?”

Coughing, Jaehyun tries to recover from the sudden blow where it hurts. The woman doesn’t mean anything by it, can’t possibly know anyway. The saying only exists because of the archetype of nymphs that village elders love to spin stories about on blustery nights: seductive, characteristically mercurial, glad to string you along. “Of course not, grandmother,” he says finally.

She hmphs, unconvinced. “The peaches are sweeter after the full moon. Take as many as you can carry.” 

“No one broke my heart,” maintains Jaehyun. “What’ll I do with so many?” He still listens to her, though, filling his basket to its absolute maximum capacity.

The woman thumbs the edges of the crumpled bills Jaehyun hands her and folds them away. “Give the extra to someone who will eat with you.” 

Jaehyun turns this over in his mind the whole way back to the house. There’s some truth in it, he thinks, or some hope. He could use either. After emptying the bounty of peaches into the nicest fruit bowl, the one webbed with filigree, he pushes it across the counter and cracks the window a few inches. A gentle breeze puffs the curtains as it snakes into the kitchen. 

Suddenly drained, he leaves the bowl where it is and decides a mid-afternoon nap is the next best course of action. His bed is made neatly, like always, even when he sleeps in it. The sheets are tucked so tight that he imagines he could disappear between them if he held his breath long enough. 

When he wakes, he returns to the kitchen to scrounge together dinner and startles. The low branch just beyond the kitchen window has a guest stalking across its length, white-tipped tail swishing. Renjun stretches from his hind legs and paws at the window, cocking his head as if to ask why Jaehyun won’t hurry and let him in already. 

Once he’s rubbed his eyes and confirmed that there is indeed a tiny fox outside his window, Jaehyun unlatches the frame. “Can I help you?” he says. “You’re not lost, are you?”

Renjun blinks at him, unimpressed. 

“Right, stupid question,” Jaehyun concludes. The thick of the forest is a long way out. There’s no way to wind up here by accident. He makes to move the fruit bowl out of the way, should Renjun want to come in, then notices the way Renjun’s eyes follow his hand. 

“These?” Scooping up the heaviest peach, Jaehyun holds it out for Renjun to sniff. He shivers as Renjun noses closer, whiskers skimming the inside of Jaehyun’s wrist, then draws back in surprise when Renjun delicately seizes the entire fruit between his teeth. Instead of biting down, he keeps his jaw locked and turns around, flicking an ear. Expectant, almost. 

Jaehyun stares for a moment before the realization hits. “Oh, you want me to follow you,” he says, feeling entirely too much like Snow White for his liking. 

Renjun leaps daintily off the branch without bothering to confirm. After wasting a few moments staring at the open window, Jaehyun hurries to swing it shut and go around the front. By the time he makes it outside, Renjun has nearly disappeared; he’s only distinguishable as an orangey blur at the foot of the gate, waiting for Jaehyun to catch up. 

It doesn’t take much longer for Jaehyun to figure out where they’re headed. He doesn’t need Renjun to guide him—not least because it uncomfortably heightens the sense of roleplaying as some virtuous maiden befriending heaven-sent woodland creatures—but he permits it this once. Holds his breath as they enter the clearing of the fairy pond and the silhouette sitting with its back to them turns at the sound of their steps.

“Hey,” says Sicheng. Renjun trots up to him and nudges Sicheng’s knee with his snout, showing off the trophy he carries in his mouth. Petting the tuft of fur between Renjun’s ears, Sicheng bends so the tip of his nose touches Renjun’s snout and whispers, “You keep it. Thank you.”

With a last, wavering look between the two of them, Renjun turns tail and slinks away.

“Hey,” Jaehyun says back finally and sighs.

Sicheng touches the patch of grass beside him. “You can sit.”

“Thanks.”

For several long minutes, neither speaks. Jaehyun closes his fingers around a small pebble that digs into the side of his thigh, turning it over in his palm a couple times, then skipping it across the pond’s surface. It hits six times, graceful, and eventually sinks at the center.

He feels the question in Sicheng’s touch before he hears it, ghosting tentatively along the line of Jaehyun’s arm. “Can you show me how?”

“Yeah,” says Jaehyun, unearthing a few more stones from the loose dirt of the bank. He rubs the lingering dust away with the pad of his thumb before pressing a few into Sicheng’s grasp. “You just wind up like this, and then the motion is kind of—” he demonstrates “—in your wrist.” 

“Seems easy.” Sicheng tosses one and it sinks immediately.

Despite trying to smother his laugh at first, Jaehyun catches Sicheng biting his lip on a smile and allows himself to relax a bit more. Perhaps the ice hasn’t been broken, exactly, but it’s at the very least cracked. Useless talk bubbles up while Sicheng collects more stones to keep practicing. Comments about the weather, and whether the rocks could secretly be geodes, and how summer has fled from them so quickly. That last one makes Jaehyun frown.

“Where have you been staying?” he asks. Soon, he won’t be around to offer up the guest bedroom.

“The fruit orchard. With the sprites.” Sicheng manages to skip one this time. “You should try sleeping under the stars.” 

Jaehyun sees the open end, the opportunity for him to bite, but he lets it roll off. “And where will you go?”

Facing him fully, Sicheng says, “I don’t know.” 

The deja vu washes over them both at seemingly the same moment, causing Sicheng to break off the eye contact and Jaehyun to swallow roughly. How many weeks ago had he asked almost the same question and received almost the same answer? Though certainly not for lack of trying, they’re not really in too different a place. Sicheng still without his home; Jaehyun still ill-equipped to help; the air still damp and velvety as it cocoons them; the forest still hush in the face of all their prayers.

Sicheng threads the fingers of his left hand through those of Jaehyun’s right and holds tight. “What happened here?” he asks suddenly, adjusting so that Jaehyun’s hand is palm up.

Dazed, Jaehyun blinks back into focus. “I cut myself getting off my bike this morning. It’s nothing.”

The cut is so discreet, tucked at the join of Jaehyun’s wrist to his life line, that anyone else would easily have missed it. Sicheng, though, furrows his eyebrows and grazes the puckered skin with a physician’s attention. That familiar menthol tingle floods Jaehyun’s veins again. When Sicheng’s brow uncrumples, the skin beneath his fingertips is smooth. 

Jaehyun tenses in alarm. “Isn’t your magic depleted? You shouldn’t be straining yourself with stuff like this.”

“I can still do these things,” dismisses Sicheng, eyes suspiciously glassy. “Small things. Anyway, it’s the least I can do for you after all you’ve done for me.”

“I’ve barely done—”

“Please,” says Sicheng. He’s still holding Jaehyun’s hand, and now he’s meeting his gaze, too, like he’d never let go if he could help it. “Thank you for everything. Taking me in, giving me someplace dry and warm. For caring enough to follow me through the forest every day even though you always looked scared that something would pounce from the shadows and eat you.” He snorts at this, but his expression is still so fond, painted soft.

Something like panic and gratitude combined wells underneath Jaehyun’s tongue. “No, no, I should be thanking you,” he says thickly. “You showed me what I’d been missing here for so many years. Things I didn’t dare believe in before.”

“And now?”

“Of course.” Jaehyun strokes Sicheng’s cheek, daring to be tender. “Of course I believe.”

The sun is setting in earnest now, melting into the pond water and bleeding vermillion. Jaehyun and Sicheng have seen so goddamn many sunsets together, near daily as they trekked through weeping branches or tucked into each other in the crook of the sofa, and this one looks mostly the same as they all have. Maybe it’s especially beautiful because he’s granted himself the luxury of being sentimental this once. But how can he not be, when Sicheng is so radiant and warm beside him. When Sicheng is leaning in, his lips just barely catching on Jaehyun’s lips as he breathes Jaehyun’s name, and their edges notch so seamlessly that they could be leaves of the same tree. 

They kiss as the sun dips below the water, again and again, unsatisfied with each second spent apart. Sicheng in particular kisses like he’s hungry. His hands won’t stop searching, mapping wandering paths up Jaehyun’s shirt and over his chest and at the swell of his throat. Jaehyun lets him take, and when he’s had his fill for the moment, he flips them over and presses down against the inviting expanse of Sicheng’s body. 

More than anything, Jaehyun wants to suspend the hourglass and stay here indefinitely, touch-drunk in this syrup hour with Sicheng where everything is gilded. But just as the yellow light is waning, so is summer, and they both know he has to leave. 

“Do you want to come back with me tonight?” breathes Jaehyun into the curve of Sicheng’s shoulder.

Sicheng’s arms tighten around Jaehyun’s neck. “It took you long enough to ask.”

**🌿**

When Jaehyun wakes the first time, it’s early morning and the sky is weighed with dense gray clouds. He makes to get up, but Sicheng produces an incoherent noise of protest and hikes his bare leg higher up Jaehyun’s hip. “Not yet,” Sicheng murmurs, voice hardly more than a rumble. And if he says it like that, well, Jaehyun can’t argue. 

The second time, afternoon has descended. Once Jaehyun peels his eyes open, he discovers that rain has descended, too. It’s the first hint of precipitation since the storm that christened his arrival here, but the mood couldn’t be more different. This time, there’s no violent thunder, no lightning, no angered gods streaking their reprisal across the ether. There’s just Sicheng in the circle of his arms, blinking sleepily and stroking up and down Jaehyun’s nape to the gentle song of falling water.

Jaehyun brushes his lips over the junction of Sicheng’s neck and shoulder. “Is it time to get up yet?” 

With a sigh, Sicheng tilts his head back and allows Jaehyun a few moments before replying. “I guess we have to.” 

“I’ll make you breakfast,” Jaehyun tries. 

“It’s probably too late for that.”

“Lunch?” 

Sicheng’s hands have started to wander. “What if we stay here a little longer?”

Groaning, Jaehyun dips back down. He’s received by Sicheng’s parted mouth, lax and heady. When they separate, Sicheng tucks his chin over Jaehyun’s shoulder and hums in contentment. The melody breaks off when something outside the window catches his attention.

“Wait, look,” he says, nudging at Jaehyun’s chest to get him to sit up. Jaehyun turns obediently. His breath catches in his throat not a second later. 

While they were busy, the sun emerged in the midst of the shower. It’s shining almost harshly bright, defiant, tinting the continued rain a dozen shimmering hues. Sicheng squints. There’s a familiar ripple as the air pressure fluctuates and then he’s by the window without having moved a muscle.

“It’s working again,” breathes Jaehyun, fully awake now. Something giddy courses through his veins, sparking every nerve it touches. “Your powers are back.”

Sicheng turns over his shoulder, eyes alight. “Let’s go to the tree,” he says.

“Okay,” agrees Jaehyun and cracks a smile. “Let’s put some clothes on first, though.” 

They’re dressed in minutes and headed out the door immediately afterwards, lunch be damned. Every few feet, Sicheng teleports ahead as if he physically can’t contain himself, but he always glances back to make sure that Jaehyun is keeping up. Eventually, Jaehyun breaks into a full-on sprint and laughs into the wind as Sicheng flickers in and out of sight to maintain his lead. 

By the time they arrive at the tree, they’re both panting and doubled over. Sicheng looks up first, and the expression that melts over his face is so hopeful that it almost hurts to look at him. The rift in the tree trunk has been stitched over. Even the leaves look greener, freshly glossed by rainfall and fanning generously over the tops of their heads. And when Sicheng reaches out to touch, his hand meets the bark with no resistance. 

“Home sweet home,” Jaehyun says, grinning, and a dizzy Sicheng leans into him as though his legs will give out at any moment. 

“What do you think it was? The rain? Or maybe the full moon ritual just takes some time to work…?” 

“I have no idea,” confesses Jaehyun, winding an arm around Sicheng’s middle. He’s never pretended to understand how things work around here. But to the best of his knowledge, nature doesn’t miss opportunities to self-regulate; things that are needed aren’t wasted. Things that are lost will float downstream and take root where they were always meant to grow.

Sicheng strokes the bark again, resplendent in his joy. “It doesn’t matter, really. I’m just grateful.”

Jaehyun tugs him closer. “So am I.”

In the evening, they come back and climb up to the highest branches that will hold their weight, resting their heads where the boughs fork in two. Teasingly, Sicheng scales the tree in seconds and waves down at Jaehyun from the top, but he comes back down after a while so they can lay beside each other. Even despite Jaehyun’s added weight and unsteady footing, the tree holds them securely and cushions their backs with fragrant, springy bunches of moss. Jaehyun’s heart just about drops into his stomach when Sicheng fearlessly rolls over without minding the gaps in the slightest, but the branches intuitively knit themselves into a platform to support him, to welcome and protect him. As they should, Jaehyun thinks, swallowing his relief.

From here, they can easily see the stars after dusk. A cohort of jubilant fairies comes singing soon after, and Sicheng joins in the revelry, harmonizing low with their tinkling chorus. Jaehyun thinks he sees Jisung and Chenle fluttering somewhere among the mix, joined at the hip as always. The thought makes his chest warm. Sicheng seems to know each fairy by name, and he smiles sheepishly as they lavish tiny kisses onto his forehead and nose.

“Not you too,” whines Sicheng when Jaehyun sees his chance and leans over, planting a final kiss directly on Sicheng’s mouth. But the complaints are soon forgotten as he reaches out and pulls, entangling himself in Jaehyun’s legs and ribs and fingertips.

**🌷**

Despite how tempting it is to lose yourself in the countryside, the demands of city life refuse to bend for anyone. Within a few days, Jaehyun is back in his soulless apartment with the dead succulents and a hole in the left side of his chest.

He shows up to class, to the café when he knows Johnny’s working, to the gym at his regimented hour. He fields Doyoung’s questions about how his summer went without giving away too much, which proves a fairly simple task once Jaehyun gets around how it smarts like a new bruise. All he really has to do is cut out every detail that involves Sicheng. His descriptions of mealtimes become lonely; the trees that he speaks of are bereft of character or color; he reconstructs his memory of the master suite to fit one less person in the bed.

In the middle of the week, Jaehyun pays a visit to the florist’s shortly before closing. The kid behind the register has an oddly familiar face despite Jaehyun being sure he’s never seen it before. Unsettled, he tries to be discreet about hiding between clusters of lilies to avoid eye contact. 

He wanders aimlessly without pausing to admire any of the arrangements. They’re beautiful, no doubt, but they pale in comparison to the wildflowers that ringed the banks of the fairy pond, or the blooming bushes on the way to Renjun’s den. Hardly five minutes have passed before he’s spacing out with the petals of a camellia still halfway trapped between his index finger and thumb.

The day he’d left, Sicheng had been surrounded by flowers. Lying on his back in the grass, he’d allowed Jaehyun to entwine their fingers like that first time. They’d talked around it, of course. Jaehyun promised to visit as often as he could. “It’s only a couple hours by bus,” he’d repeated. “I’ll be back before you know it.”

Except now that he’s away, each day feels longer than the last. He especially can’t stand to be alone in his apartment all the time, because now that he’s seen it for how bare it truly is, it saps his morale just to step inside. He’s better off pouring energy into things that give him tangible reward: studying, or deadlifting, or staying late at the café to help Johnny wipe the crumbs off the tables and smudges of jam off the counter. One time he had even tried washing the built-up dishes in the sink, but Johnny had incredulously thrown a dish towel at his head and ordered him to leave.

Jaehyun’s about to get the same request now, he can tell. The kid at the register has begun fiddling with his hands and coughing awkwardly to attract Jaehyun’s attention. When neither works, he seems to gather up resolve and walks up to where Jaehyun is examining a giant pot of aloe vera. “Excuse me,” he starts, his voice reedy.

“I’m leaving,” says Jaehyun with a sigh. “Have a good night.” The doorbell chimes faintly as he departs. 

He walks back to his building with his head down, lifting it only to nod at the receptionist. The elevator’s been repaired, but he takes the stairs out of habit. It burns pleasantly at his thighs. He’s tired enough that when he reaches his door, he spends two whole minutes fumbling with the keys before the lock finally clicks open in acquiescence.

“Rough day, huh.”

Jaehyun spins around so fast he nearly breaks his own neck.

“Surprise,” says Sicheng with a grin. He’s wearing a set of pajamas that Jaehyun had left behind and he’d inadvertently stolen. The too-long sleeves bunch at his wrist, and there’s a stray leaf caught in his hair. He’s beguiling.

“How did you get here,” says Jaehyun. “I’m not dreaming, right? This is reality?”

“I’ll pinch you,” Sicheng offers helpfully.

Fuck that. Jaehyun rushes to him, gathers Sicheng in his arms, kisses him dizzy. The proof is in the way Sicheng sighs and automatically snakes his hand over the slope of Jaehyun’s shoulder, chest firm against his own. No dream tastes this sweet.

“How?” Jaehyun repeats when they part. “You came here all alone?”

Sicheng shrugs. “You left the drawings of the bus routes and your apartment block. I scooped up some coins from the bottom of the pond to pay for it. Maybe too many. My pockets won’t stop jingling.” He pats them for effect, casual as you please. 

Blinking, Jaehyun decides to leave the question of whether stealing wish coins from a sacred clearing is an act of blasphemy or not for another day. “So you just walked here from the bus stop and came inside.”

“Yeah, they don’t lock the front doors during the day. Doesn’t seem very safe.” The corner of Sicheng’s mouth tugs upwards a little more with each one of Jaehyun’s questions as if relishing the shock his appearance brought about. 

“But your home. You just got it back,” presses Jaehyun, uncomprehending even now. “Don’t you want to stay?”

“Of course I do. That’s somewhere I’ll always return. But after you left, I kept thinking about everything outside and how you described it, and I thought, you know. I should come see it.”

Jaehyun’s hand rises to Sicheng’s jaw, cradling his face. Admiring the earnest shine in his eyes. “You want me to play tour guide now? You won’t even admit you came all this way because you missed me.”

“Shut up,” mutters Sicheng, thumping his loosely curled fist against Jaehyun’s sternum. 

Without missing a beat, Jaehyun catches his hand and holds it, palm flat against his own and their fingers interlocked. “I missed _ you_,” he confesses. “So much.”

Sicheng leans all the way in until Jaehyun is already closing his eyes. “Good, because I'll be here a while,” he whispers against Jaehyun’s lips. "My home is with you, too."

**Author's Note:**

> you can find me on twitter [here](https://twitter.com/tyongflan) or drop me a [cc](https://curiouscat.me/daelos) ♡


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